Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. opposition Labour leader Ed
Miliband put the spotlight on banks as his party began its
annual conference, saying that if he becomes premier he’ll force
through laws to break them up unless they change their behavior.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s government plans to
implement the recommendations of John Vickers’s Independent
Commission on Banking to establish firewalls between banks’
consumer and investment operations. Miliband, speaking in
Manchester, northern England, said yesterday the Vickers plan
has already been “watered down” and expressed concern it
wouldn’t be pushed through completely.

Miliband mentioned “banks,” “bankers” and “banking”
26 times in an interview on BBC Television’s “Andrew Marr
Show,” more than he said “Labour” or “government.” He said
that, unlike Cameron, he would “stand up to the banks” if he
won power. He also renewed a call for a tax on bankers’ bonuses.

“There’s two things that can happen,” Miliband was quoted
as telling the Observer newspaper in an interview published
yesterday. “The banks can change direction and say we’re going
to implement the spirit and principle of Vickers to the full,
which means the hard ring-fence between retail and investment
banking. Either they do that or I’m giving a very, very clear
message which is that the next Labour government will just by
law break up retail-investment banks.”

Libor Manipulation

London’s financial industry has been marred by scandal,
with Barclays Plc being fined a record 290 million pounds ($468
million) in June for manipulating the benchmark London interbank
offered rate. A government-commissioned report recommended three
days ago that the British Bankers’ Association should be
stripped of responsibility for managing the rate and oversight
handed to the U.K.’s financial regulator.

People “want safety in their banking system; they want
clarity about what’s happening in their banks,” Miliband told
the BBC. “If you have banks that work for small businesses and
get them the loans, then that’s better for the economy and
better for them.”

While the government is pushing legislation through
Parliament to put most of the Vickers recommendations into
effect, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced in
June that lenders won’t have to hold as much capital as the
commission proposed.

The Labour leader also said his party would reverse a cut
in the top rate of income tax to 45 percent from 50 percent if
it were in power now, as well as repealing the changes made by
Cameron’s Conservative-led government to the management of the
state-run National Health Service.

Miliband said the idea of a mansion tax on the most
expensive homes, a key policy of Cameron’s Liberal Democrat
coalition partners, is “definitely worth considering” and that
there could be cross-party support for such a move were the
government to introduce it.